'Yes, yes', said Nikolka unhappily, and Elena hung her head.
Alexei started to get excited, tried to sit up, but a sharp pain pulled him down and he groaned, then said irritably:
'Get him out of here!'
'Shall I put the bird in the kitchen?
I've covered it with a cloth, and it's not making any noise', Lariosik whispered anxiously to Elena.
Elena waved him away:
'No, that's not it, don't worry . . .'
Nikolka strode purposefully out into the dining-room.
His hair dishevelled, he glanced at the clock face: the hands were pointing to around ten o'clock.
Worried, Anyuta came into the dining-room.
'How is Alexei Vasilievich?' she asked.
'He's delirious', Nikolka replied with a deep sigh.
'Oh my God', whispered Anyuta. 'Why doesn't the doctor come?'
Nikolka looked at her and went back into the bedroom.
He leaned close to Elena's ear and began to whisper urgently:
'I don't care what you say, I'm going out for a doctor.
It's ten o'clock.
The street is completely quiet.'
'Let's wait until half past ten', whispered Elena in reply, nodding and twisting a handkerchief in her hands. 'It wouldn't be right to call in another doctor.
I know our doctor will come.'
Soon after ten o'clock a great, clumsy heavy mortar moved into the crowded little bedroom.
Alexei was in despair: how were they all to survive?
And now there stood this mortar, filling the room from wall to wall, with one wheel pressing against the bed.
Life would be impossible, because one would have to crawl between those thick spokes, then arch one's back and squeeze through the other wheel, carrying all one's luggage which seemed to be hanging from one's left arm.
It was pulling one's arm down to the ground, cutting into one's armpit with a rope.
No one could move the mortar. The whole apartment was full of them, according to instructions, and Colonel Malyshev and Elena could only stare helplessly through the wheels, unable to do anything to remove the gun or at least to move a sick man into a more tolerable room that wasn't crowded out with mortars.
Thanks to that damned heavy, cold piece of ordnance the whole apartment had turned into a cheap hotel.
The doorbell was ringing frequently . . . rrring . . . and people were coming to call.
Colonel Malyshev flitted past, looking awkward, in a hat that was too big for him, wearing gold epaulettes, and carrying a heap of papers.
Alexei shouted at him and Malyshev disappeared into the muzzle of the mortar and was replaced by Nikolka, bustling about and behaving with stupid obstinacy.
Nikolka gave Alexei something to drink, but it was not a cold spiralling stream of water from a fountain but some disgusting lukewarm liquid that smelled of washing-up water.
'Ugh . . . horrible . . . take it away', mumbled Alexei.
Startled, Nikolka raised his eyebrows, but persisted obstinately and clumsily.
Frequently Elena changed into the black, unfamiliar figure of Lariosik, Sergei's nephew, and then as it turned back into Elena he felt her fingers somewhere near his forehead, which gave him little or no relief.
Elena's hands, usually warm and deft now felt as rough and as clumsy as rakes and did everything to make a peaceful man's life miserable in this damned armorer's yard he was lying in.
Surely Elena was not responsible for this pole on which Alexei's wounded body had been laid?
Yet now she was sitting on it . . . what's the matter with her? . . . sitting on the end of the pole and her weight was making it start to spin sickeningly round . . .
How can a man live if a round pole is cutting into his body?
No, no, they're behaving intolerably! As loudly as he could, though it came out as a mere whisper, Alexei called out:
'Julia!'
Julia, however, did not emerge from her old-fashioned room with its portrait of a man in gold epaulettes and the uniform of the 1840's, and she did not hear the sick man's cry.
And that poor sick man would have been driven mad by the gray figures which began pacing about the room alongside his brother and sister, had there not also come a stout man in gold-rimmed spectacles, a man of skill and firm confidence.
In honor of his appearance an extra light was brought into the bedroom - the light of a flickering wax candle in a heavy, old black candlestick.
At one moment the light glimmered on the table, at the next it was moving around Alexei, above it the ugly, distorted shadow of Lariosik, looking like a bat with its wings cut off.
The candle bent forward, dripping white wax.
The little bedroom reeked with the heavy smells of iodine, surgical spirit and ether.
On the table arose a chaos of glittering boxes, spirit lamps reflected in shining nickel-plate, and heaps of cotton wool, like snow at Christmas.
With his warm hands the stout man gave Alexei a miraculous injection in his good arm, and in a few minutes the gray figures ceased to trouble him.
The mortar was pushed out on to the verandah, after which its black muzzle, poking through the draped windows, no longer seemed menacing.
He began to breathe more easily, because the huge wheel had been removed and he was no longer obliged to crawl through its spokes.